And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and
by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,--life
beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the firmament, with
the revolution that turns the surface in ceaseless round to the source of
life and light.
A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk! Before you have solved their
mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified slag,
or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces. Mysteries are common
enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and Dorchester think of
"brickbats" and the spawn of creatures that live in roadside puddles.
But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly plain,
when we can get at them so as to turn them over. How many ghosts that
"thick men's blood with cold" prove to be shirts hung out to dry! How
many mermaids have been made out of seals! How many times have
horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!
--Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the matter
with the patient.
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